In April, I cut twelve poems from the poetry manuscript I planned to have finished by summer. Twelve out of sixty is a lot of poems. More than that, the poems were a thread in the book that no longer worked. Meaning, I took out a section of poems on a topic that (I once […]
On Listening
A writer has to be a good listener. Some might call us great eavesdroppers too. There’s a practice I learned from the Unitarian Universalists called ‘deep listening’. I sat in a small circle of people and when someone talked, everyone else listened and no one responded. Words floated in the room, living and breathing without input or […]
On Focus
We’re in the 9th week of pandemic homeschool. When it comes to my six-year-old boys, focus is a daily struggle. And I get it. They don’t understand that Monday thru Friday the living room transforms into a classroom. When they see the couch, they do what they normally do: jump, climb, and wrestle. That I […]
On Lyric Poetry
My school-aged children attended their last day at school on March 13, 2020. The following week I transitioned my house and work-life to include homeschool. On Sunday morning I woke up early, before everyone else in the house, and cried. A good, deep cry as I sat at my new “teacher’s desk.” Then I wrote […]
On Poetry
Poet Ralph Angel once said to a student: “I’m not interested in the story of my life. I’m interested in the fact of my life. The fact of my reality…any poet worth her salt…deals with their shit directly.” In an interview with poet Gregory Orr, Krista Tippett said, “To talk about poetry is to talk […]
On Home
In his book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski says, “Before the idea of the home as the seat of family life could enter the human consciousness, it required the experience of both privacy and intimacy, neither of which had been possible in the medieval hall.” The first time I encountered the […]
